Hi!! It has been over a month since the last edition of Lil Red’s Book Club and that is because I have been insanely busy! I was so excited to have some extra time to read recently and started Verity by Colleen Hoover last week. At first, I was really into it. However, this ended up being the worst and *pardon my French* most fucked up thing I have ever read in a long time. Before we get started, I am going to be placing a big fat trigger warning on Verity for so many reasons – murder, infanticide, child abuse, highly disturbing content, and that’s just naming a few. Now, let’s get to it:

Lowen is a struggling author who hasn’t left the home in weeks as she cares for her ailing mom. However, she must step foot outside today because she has a meeting for a potential new offer that must be conducted in person. As she waits to cross the busy streets of Manhattan, she witnesses a man get hit by a car and is standing close enough to get her clothes bloodied. A handsome stranger literally gives Lowen the shirt off of his back in a chance encounter and she arrives at her meeting in a men’s shirt thinking she will never see this guy again. WRONG!

The stranger is named Jeremy and the meeting Lowen is attending is being held on his wife’s behalf. The highly successful author, Verity Crawford, is Jeremy’s wife and is unable to complete her contract after a car accident that left her with no cognitive function. Verity is the author of a series told from the villain’s perspective and has three more books to be written. Cue: Lowen to take over.

After rejecting initially, Lowen agrees because the paycheck is insane and she is essentially homeless. Because Verity cannot collaborate with Lowen in a traditional sense, Jeremy opens the doors of his wife’s home office so she can begin looking for notes and drafts to assist in her new gig. Of course, Lowen would never go to a complete stranger’s home without doing her due diligence and researching the Crawford family. She learns that the Crawfords had twin girls that died exactly six months apart from each other, a son who remains, and a mother who can no longer interact with him or her husband.

Knowing so much already about the family’s tragedies makes Lowen feel uneasy and she spends the majority of her first days at the family home barricaded in the office. Although she can find no notes of any use for the books she must write, she finds so much more: a manuscript for Verity’s unpublished autobiography. Lowen justifies cracking it open to get a better glimpse of Verity as a person and ends up learning so much more than she bargained for.

Verity’s autobiography paints a brutally honest picture of herself as a psychopath. She is madly in love with Jeremy to the point of obsession and was not happy to find out she was pregnant with twin girls – two girls that would take Jeremy away from her. In her own words, Verity describes her monstrous acts of the abuse she doled out to her daughters and her manipulation to cover it up. Her autobiography begs the question of if the death of the twins was accidental or completely intentional.

It’s not only Verity’s manuscript that makes Lowen uneasy, it is Verity herself, who is at home and being cared for around the clock by a nurse. Verity needs people to move her body for her, so why does Lowen keep hearing the pattering of feet at night? Or how is the TV in Verity’s room turning off on its own when the remote is out of her reach?

The more time Lowen spends in the Crawford home, the more paranoid she becomes that Verity’s injuries might not be real. And, as Lowen begins crushing on Jeremy and caring for his son, the more convinced she is that they are all in danger. Is Verity actually hurt? And what is the truth behind her damning manuscript? Read Verity to find out!

I have SO much to say about Verity lol. It’s funny because as I was writing the synopsis, I am sure you can all agree that this sounds like a book that I would love. However, I ended up absolutely hating this book. I honestly didn’t know what I was reading and it felt like so many story lines being added together haphazardly. Part of Verity read like soft core porn, some of it was like reading a soap opera, and gruesome content seemed like it was added in purely for shock value.

All of you know that I am a huge thriller, horror, true crime fan and, I shit you not, this was probably one of the most disturbing books I have ever read. Reading Verity’s autobiography was so infuriating to me that I almost stopped reading it completely. It is that bad and I think that is saying a lot coming from me. I finished the book solely because I refuse to not read something in its entirety once I have started it and was unable to find any redeeming qualities.

It wasn’t the content of Verity alone that made it such a flop but it was the way it was written too. I found Colleen Hoover’s writing style to be juvenile at best. The characters were incredibly shallow and despite knowing the bad things that happened to them, you didn’t really know them at all. Lowen, for example, was such a lackluster heroine and Hoover built up her past to make her seem tragic when all she really suffered from was sleepwalking and a poor relationship with her mom. Jeremy was pretty much only there as man candy. And, Verity was plain awful but you never learned the “why” behind it. All this book did was leave me with expletives and question marks.

This doesn’t happen often, but I am going to rate Verity with a negative infinity out of ten stars and wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy. This book straight up sucked and I will never read anything else by Colleen Hoover. Epic, epic failure.

What are you currently reading? What should I read next? I want to hear from all of you, so leave me a comment and let’s chat! Much love. -Sarah